if, after all the process, the polished shaft is to be broken in two, and tossed away as rubbish?  If death ends faculty, it is a pity that the faculty was so patiently developed.  If God is educating us all in His school, and then means that, like some wastrel boys, we should lose all our education as soon as we leave its benches, there is little use in the rod, and little meaning in the training.  Brethren! life is an insoluble riddle unless the purpose of it lie yonder, and unless all this patient training of our sorrows and our gladnesses, the warmth that expands and the cold that contracts the heart, the light that gladdens and the darkness that saddens the eye and the spirit, are equally meant for training us for the perfect life of a perfect soul moving a perfect body in a perfect universe.  Here is a pillar in some ancient hall that has fallen into poor hands, and has had a low roof thrown across the centre of the chamber at half its height.  In the lower half there is part of a pillar that means nothing; ugly, bare, evidently climbing, and passing through the aperture, and away above yonder is the carved capital and the great entablature that it carries.  Who could understand the shaft unless he could look up through the aperture, and see the summit?  And who can think of life as anything but a wretched fragment unless he knows that all which begins here runs upwards into the room above, and there finds its explanation and its completion?

But there is the third sphere of the divine operation.  As in creation and in providence, so in all the work and mystery of our redemption, this is the goal that God has in view.  It was not worth Christ’s while to come and die, if nothing more was to come of it than the imperfect reception of His blessings and gifts which the noblest Christian life in this world presents.  The meaning and purpose of the Cross, the meaning and purpose of all the patient dealings of His whispering Spirit, are that we shall be like our Divine Lord in spirit first, and in body afterwards.

And everything about the experiences of a true Christian spirit is charged with a prophecy of immortality.  I have not time to dwell upon one point gathered from the context, that I intended to have insisted upon, viz. that the very desires which God’s good Spirit works in a believing soul are themselves confirmations of their own fulfilment.  But if you notice at your leisure the verses that precede my text, you will find that the Apostle adduces the groanings of ’earnest desire to be clothed with our house which is from Heaven,’ as a proof that we have ‘a building of God, a house not made with hands.’  That is to say, every longing in a Christian heart when it is most filled with that Spirit, and most in contact with God, and which is the answer of that heart to a promise of Christ—­every such longing carries with it the assurance of its own fulfilment.  He that hath wrought it has wrought it in order that